Reparative JusticePart 1 of 11 · The idea
What reparations mean
The rich of Western Europe enslaved and colonised millions of people. Their stolen wealth built capitalism. So real repair must change the whole system.
The system was never broken it was designed this way
In order for imperialists to maintain capitalism, it must oppress, exploit and subjugate
Systemic racism and gendered violence is rooted in capitalism, the legacy of enslavement and colonialism
There is no justice on stolen land
There is no peace, justice or democracy in capitalism.
Capitalism (enslavement and colonialism's legacy) must be dismantled
Defining revolutionary reparations
The long struggle for planetary reparations must not only establish the permanent conditions for truth, healing and repair from the traumas of enslavement and colonialism caused by the wealthy, but our emancipation and liberation from its enduring legacy, capitalism, for a just, peaceful, equal, democratic and sustainable alternative.
800 years in the making
- The Mandé Charter of 1222, West Africa
- 1993 Abuja Proclamation, African Union
- 2001/2021 UN Durban Declaration
- 2005 UN Resolution 60/147: Right to Remedy and Reparations
- 2013 Caribbean Community (Caricom) 10 Point Plan
- 2021 UN Report into racial justice and systemic racism
- And many more anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements
Understanding the call for reparations
Western European elites enslaved, colonised, and slaughtered millions of people in Africa, the Americas, and Asia, decimating and plundering cultures and societies in the process. Millions of people were trafficked, kidnapped, drowned, or murdered on plantations.
The injustices and horrors of enslavement and colonialism fuelled Western Europe's rapid industrialisation and wealth, spawning settler-colonies such as the United States, Canada, and Australia. European and settler-colony imperialism and militarism ensured the globalisation of capitalism, as well as Eurocentric laws, propaganda, and criminal systems to protect private property.
Eurocentric elites implemented and violently reinforced capitalism, a corrupt world system with no legitimacy, through imperialism. Millions of indigenous people were displaced from their lands (which they managed in harmony with nature) and forced into reservations in order to facilitate capitalist development.
Reparations must change the system
Millions of families are still being torn apart by the legacies of slavery and colonialism, and millions more are seeking asylum as a result of the symptoms and consequences of capitalist development, such as subjugation, militarism, and famine.
All of the world's peoples are forced to live under cruel and unsustainable capitalist ideology of anti-democracy, profits, extreme inequalities, over-production and over-consumption, competition, waste and ecocide which is causing global disarray and unrest.
Under the current Euro-centric capitalist socio-economic political hegemony, which subjugates by racial and other identities, the violent interruption to indigenous cultures, faiths, languages, and traditions can never be atoned for.
In order to decolonise, we must begin with the political economy imposed on us through enslavement and colonialism.
The only real decolonization is anti-imperialism and anti- capitalism. You cannot decolonize your mind unless you also decolonize the conditions of social production that reinforce the colonial mentality
For truth, healing a repair
A global policy (the Ubuntu tax) for reparations from enslavement and colonialism
For emancipation and liberation
Raising the Ubuntu tax to weaken capitalism in order to change power relations and build a new political economy that is just, democratic, equal and sustainable